VerifiedUK Research · July 2026
We analysed 88,872 UK job ads against the Home Office Register of Licensed Sponsors. Only 8,818 of the 124,741 licensed sponsors — about 1 in 14 — advertised a single visa-eligible job in the last 90 days.
Live figures on this page recompute from our dataset with every daily refresh.
88,872
job ads analysed since April 2026
124,741
companies on the Home Office register
7.1%
of sponsors advertised an eligible job in 90 days
61,109
visa-eligible jobs live right now
The standard advice for international candidates is "target companies on the sponsor register." The register currently holds 124,741 companies — but holding a licence and hiring are very different things. In the last 90 days, only 8,818 of them advertised at least one role that passed both the sponsorship check and the 2026 salary thresholds.
Licensed sponsors with ≥1 eligible job advertised, last 90 days
The practical consequence: applying "across the register" wastes most of your effort on licence holders with no current openings. The effective target list for a job seeker is roughly 8800 companies, not 125,000 — and it changes weekly, which is why we rank the directory by hiring activity.
Job ads use trading names; the register uses legal entity names. When an advertised company name only loosely matched a register entry, we ran every ambiguous pair through a secondary verification pass. The result:
~90%
of loose name matches turned out to be a different company entirely — a same-name lookalike with no licence at all
If you are eyeballing the register before applying, an approximate name match is close to meaningless. "Meta" appears as "Facebook UK Ltd"; a care home's trading name may differ from its registered entity in every word. This single failure mode is why we verify every job's employer against the register individually rather than trusting the name on the ad.
The £41,700 standard threshold dominates the conversation, but the New Entrant rate — £33,400 for recent graduates, under-26s and Graduate-visa switchers — is the number that actually governs most early-career roles. Of the sponsor jobs live in our dataset today, roughly 7 in 10 clear the applicable 2026 threshold.
Standard rate
£41,700
New entrant rate
£33,400
the one most graduates actually need
Volume is concentrated in staffing, care, engineering and consulting — not the big-tech names most applicants fixate on. The most active sponsors in our data over the last 90 days:
Eligible roles advertised per company, last 90 days. Click any bar for the full sponsor profile.
You are welcome to cite this report with a link to this page. For sector or city cuts of the data, email support@verifiedsponsor.co.uk.
Every job on VerifiedUK already passed these checks.
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